“I’ll heal in a moment,” Mircea said, hoping it was true. But the vampires who mended hurts so quickly were far older than he, and had large families from which to draw strength. He had a hysterical woman, the disembodied consciousness of his daughter, and half a body. He was going to die, wasn’t he?
And then he felt like an ass, because if it hadn’t been for his little group, he’d be dead already.
Dorina had been with him on that awful ship, something he would have given a great deal to spare her. But he had reason to be grateful for her presence: she’d been the one to flit down to the hold, to wake the red-haired woman, and to persuade her to reactivate the portal. And then to help Mircea break through that strange paralysis long enough to crawl a few yards, near to where a group of unconscious vampires lay slumped by the mainmast.
He hadn’t been much better off himself, dizzy and prone to body parts suddenly going unresponsive. And he’d been confused as to what, exactly, he was doing here, instead of finding a way to slip into the water without anybody noticing. But that wasn’t likely, and he assumed Dorina had a reason—
And then he’d felt it, the dim thrum, thrum, thrum of the portal’s energy, radiating upward from the ceiling of the room below.
For a moment, his eyes had widened and his heart had leapt, because portals didn’t have sides, did they? They weren’t like doorways: they could be entered from any angle, and still dump you out . . . wherever they went. It wasn’t guesswork. He’d used one before; he knew how they worked!
So, if he could just break through these boards . . .
But he couldn’t.
They were nothing special, just normal boards, sturdy yet weathered by sun and sea. Normally, smashing them to bits would have been the work of a moment. But today, nothing was normal. And if Mircea’s limbs were clumsy, it was nothing compared to his hands.
They flopped against the deck like two beached fish, all but useless. He couldn’t get any strength behind them, and even if he did manage to break through the damned planks, how was he supposed to remove them in his current state? How was he supposed to pry up the deck of the ship without bringing every sailor on board down on his head?
It was impossible!
He lay there, furious and terrified, feeling the portal’s power quite literally just below him, but having no way to access it.
Dorina, he thought, his gut twisting. He had to find a way to persuade her to leave, before she saw . . . what she was going to see. He didn’t want her to remember him like that. He didn’t want—
And then something hit his face.
A single drop of water ran down his cheek, distracting his thoughts. And then another, and another, the soft patter steadily growing harder. It cut through the greasy feel of that terrible smoke, still billowing this way even as the winds picked up and the rain came down and the ship began to rock slightly, side to side. And as Mircea looked skyward . . .
At a miracle.
He’d felt like laughing, even in that awful place. Because God—and yes, there was a God; he knew that because the Divine delighted in tormenting him—had decided he’d suffered enough. And sent him salvation in the form of one of Venice’s famous November storms.
A big one.
The skies hadn’t cracked open so much as torn asunder, suddenly deluging the small ship with a solid sheet of rain. Along with wind and lightning and cresting waves that sent the vessel sliding around on its anchor. And mages yelling and rushing to get their cargo secured, so that it didn’t tip into the sea.
Mircea barely noticed. He had started scrabbling at the deck, desperate to break through, and failing because his hands still didn’t work. But his elbows did. Enough, at least, for him to punch through the boards with brute force, and then to te
ar at them with teeth and elbows and wrists, heedless of the sound now, most of which was covered by thunder in any case.
Speed was all that mattered.
Yet he still hadn’t been fast enough.
Somebody saw him; he didn’t know who, but it didn’t matter. Not with hands suddenly grabbing him, dragging him back. But the portal had seized him, too, catching the fist he’d accidentally dangled too low and pulling, pulling, pulling.
Hence the broken legs—or shattered, more like—that had resulted from the tug-of-war between a powerful magical object and half a dozen men. The portal won, in the end. But it was safe to say that Mircea still lost.
Maybe God wasn’t finished toying with him, after all.
But then, as he was dumped onto the flooded streets of the Rialto, still desperately fighting to get away, he received his second miracle: the portal shut down. Not correctly or properly—at least, he assumed not. Since it cut several mages and a vampire in half in the process, when the shortcut through space they’d been using suddenly disappeared.
The two mages were human; they had not continued to move for long.
But the vampire was different, and he wasn’t one of the poor sods destined for the rendering pots, but one of those putting them there. Worse, he was a master. And even half a master, Mircea had discovered, was far more powerful than he.
The vamp might be trailing half his intestines behind him, but he still had two good arms. And an excess of shattered boards that had followed them through the portal. Quicker than Mircea could parry, almost quicker than he could see, the master grabbed one of them, snapped off the end to give it an edge, and—